A Focus for Teachers and Administrators of Middle-High Schools

Welcome to Common Core Standards Applied. On this site you will find information that connects teachers, administrators and students to the Common Core Standards. The focus of the site is to provide educators with the most up to date information on the evolution of the standards. Administrators and curriculum directors will find this site useful when presenting information to their respective faculty and staff on the standards.

Learning the Common Core Curriculum

Many teachers and principals find the Common Core confusing and overwhelming. There are instructional shifts, the standards, crosswalks, state standards, publisher's criteria, lexile levels and PARRC assessments. Where exactly does someone start to decipher all of this new information? The pages to the left are in order of how you should learn about the Common Core Standards. Each page contains important information in order to understand each part of the standards as well as, excellent links to resources and updates on the standards. I also have included information relevant to New York state teachers and principals. Please check your state education websites for important updates if you live outside of New York.

Getting Started

The next step is to become familiar with the Instructional shifts. For an explanation of the shifts, click on Instructional Shifts on the left navigation bar. It is important for all teachers to have a clear understanding of both the Math and ELA shifts.

The next step is to become familiar with the standards of your content area. For an explanation on how to read the standards, please click on the left navigation bar that has your content area. Keep in mind that the standards are not a new curriculum for you to learn, rather the standards are specific reading/writing strategies that must be included as you teach the curriculum in your content area (discipline). The math and English language arts standards do bring about a significant change in the focus of the curriculum that is currently being taught.

Once you are familiar with math and English language arts standards you will want to do a crosswalk with your current standards to help you make adjustments to your curriculum maps. The other content areas will work on developing new curriculum maps to figure out when the 10 standards for reading and writing will be taught during your units. At this point you will also want to read the Publisher's Criteria. This will provide you with guidance with aligning your instructional materials to the standards. You will find this located on the left navigational bars under all of the standards.

Since many content area teachers are not certified reading and writing teachers it is important to understand the processes of teaching both content area reading and writing strategies and discipline reading and writing strategies to your students. In order for students to be successful with the Common Core Standards and the PARRC Assessments, content-area teachers must become proficient with teaching reading and writing strategies within their disciplines. After all the standards are focused on reading and writing skills. The navigation bar on the left contains information on both reading and writing strategies across the curriculum.

Become familiar with the PARRC Assessments, this appears to be the way many states are going with the new upcoming assessments. It is my understanding these tests are going to be about 80% reading and writing questions based on the content as opposed to recall of facts from the discipline. 20% will be recall and factual of the material of the discipline. It is important as these tests are developed to continue examining what type of content will appear on the exam itself.

Confidence is the key to implementing the standards.

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